I am tired.
I am tired of watching myself die on television. I am tired of getting attached to characters only to see them bleed to death after finally getting their happiness. I am tired of being baited into watching a show for their queer characters only for a stray bullet to kill them. I am tired of showrunners wanting praise for their twist that ends with another queer character dying for no reason other than to shock their audience.
I am just so tired of seeing myself die over and over again.
“Bury Your Gays” isn’t new. It has been around for as long as I remember watching television, like when Tara (Amber Benson) was killed by a stray bullet in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. At the time, I didn’t understand the implication or impact it would have on my — and so many queer kids’ — psyche. I knew that one-half of my favourite couple had been killed, and I had to watch it happen.
Later on, it would be apparent that Tara’s death might have been the first one I experienced but not the only one.
The trend of killing queer characters is just one of many we must watch and suffer through, trends like the straight girl who experiments only to go back to her boyfriend, or the queerbaiting for ratings only to have it be one kiss and never spoken of again. A queer audience is starved for representation and so, for most, having to watch themselves die repeatedly is traumatizing.
A few years ago, clamour about “Bury Your Gays” exploded after The 100 killed Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey). While it was understood that the move had been made because Debnam-Carey had to leave for another show, it didn’t hurt any less.
After Lexa had her happy moment, culminating in her and Clarke (Eliza Taylor) finally admitting to their feelings for each other, watching her take a stray bullet was hurtful. Lexa’s death started “a movement” for many; it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and changes would have to come. More people started talking about the effect of “Bury Your Gays,” about positive representation, and so much more. Lexa’s death didn’t start the conversation, but it brought it to the forefront.
And for a while, we believed that change had come. The queer audience started trusting again, or at least tried to. Shows like Sex Education; Love, Victor; Elite; or Wynonna Earp showcased the best of the best, proving that maybe happiness was a possibility.
And then, the final episode of Killing Eve happened.
Killing Eve had been a breath of fresh air from the first season on. There was something about the show that just felt like nothing before. The audience watched Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) play cat and mouse for four seasons, as their romance developed from subtextual to explicit. No matter what some people behind the camera would like us to believe, anyone who watched the show can tell you that it was a love story.
As Eve and Villanelle finally had their happy ending, acting on four seasons’ worth of feelings and emotions, the show decided to simply kill off a character that had been beloved and praised. And do it in a fashion that was so cruel and unceremonious. In the final moments, they destroyed everything they had worked on for the show’s entire run.
What Killing Eve did in the show’s final moment wasn’t brave or groundbreaking. It was spitting in the face of the queer audience they had garnered since that first moment where Villanelle and Eve looked at each other in the bathroom during season one.
It was the showcase of a showrunner having no idea who those characters were. And that is what hurts the most about this. Yes, it’s another example of “Bury Your Gays,” but most importantly, it is the definition of bad writing.
After telling the audience afterwards in interviews that Villanelle dying was Eve’s rebirth, trying to justify it by making the fans that spoke against the final moment look like fools as if they were grasping at straws that were simply not there.
It’s looking at the audience that made you a hit TV show and saying thank you, but no thank you.
There is no point in having four seasons of romantic build-up, only to have one half die in the last seconds of your season just to shock everyone and not give a satisfying ending to the story you have been telling.
Showrunners like to justify this practice with the term “shock value.” Shock value isn’t new to television, it has been around for a very long time, but it has been made much more of a common practice in recent years, with shows like Game of Thrones banking on shocking their audience to keep them entertained.
The creative forces behind the show are trying to justify another killing of a beloved character for no reason other than shock. In reality, the audience doesn’t want to be shocked in the final moment. They want to be satisfied, have answers to the questions raised during the show’s run, and give beloved characters the ending they deserve.
Killing Eve failed to do any of that.
This ending for Killing Eve is frustrating because the show gave the audience hope. A queer audience doesn’t trust easily, yet the show made us trust them, only to pull the rug out from under our feet, leaving us with more questions than anything else.
Killing Eve suffered from the fact that a new showrunner came in every season and saw everything differently. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge saw them as a love story during the first season, every other showrunner saw them in a different light. The only constant is Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer being there and relating to their characters.
We watched Eve and Villanelle finally come together, after being kept apart for so much of the series, finally agreeing that they needed each other. For a while, fans of the show had believed that both characters would meet their end and that their toxic cycle would bring death. That would have been okay, still disappointing, but it would have made more sense than what happened.
Because just as the show seemed to settle and give us the happy ending, a shot out of nowhere came, and Villanelle met her end. What was even more cruel was the show ending with text — which Killing Eve had used during its run to tell us where we were — stating “The End” as we sat in disbelief that the show we all loved and cared for had swooped so low.
It was another example of not planning the show, a consequence of having a new showrunner after every season. All viewed the show from a different perspective and never had the same opinion on the central relationship.
Killing Eve is just the latest example in a long line of shows exploiting their queer audience only to disappoint by the end. What hurts the most is when you think about how the books the show was based on gave Villanelle and Eve their happy ending.
Will Killing Eve be the last one to use this tiring trope? I would like to say yes, but the truth is probably not.
We will probably have to watch ourselves die on television again and again for a while. Sure, representation is better than ever, but until straight writers start to understand how watching this trope play out on television affects us, they will not stop using it — instead, continuing to exploit it and simply state what has been said before: that no one is safe on their shows.
